Category: Technical Writing

Welcome

Karen Rempel New York Technical Writer Marketing Writer Editor Senior Documentation Specialist
Technical Writer and Marketing Writer Karen Rempel

Hi, I’m Karen Rempel, a New York-based documentation team lead, specializing in technical writing, marketing collateral, and content management. Do you need help with a tough writing challenge? Let me help you by:

  • leading your team of talented in-house professionals or contract writers to scope, plan, and execute initiatives such as software or documentation conversion projects.
  • documenting your product or process so that your customers have quick success.
  • developing new internal or external web content and product collateral.
  • creating standard operating procedures to capture knowledge and guide your staff to perform their jobs faster and better.
  • working with your development team to design products that are easy to understand and use.
  • taking on a writing job that your in-house writers simply don’t have time for because your business is humming along and staff workload is already at full capacity.

This is my website for showcasing my technical and marketing writing and leadership experience and helping you get to know me a little. Tell me how I can help you with your top technical writing pain points; call me at 347.362.5677 or send an email to kyr@karenrempel.com.

Technical Writer Team Lead with Experience and Extraordinary Ability

I have a passion for helping my clients and colleagues bridge the gap between people, processes, and technology. I specialize in taking on tough technical project challenges and turning over an easy-to-update system for you to maintain. I lead teams of technical writers to create the documentation you need to help your people and business succeed.

I’ve served my professional community, the Society for Technical Communication, as both Chapter President and International Competition Judging Manager. I’ve won writing awards at both the national and international levels, and have been recognized for my community leadership skills and extraordinary ability in technical writing.

Whether your project is big or small, I’d love to discuss how I can help you solve your documentation challenges. Call me at  347.362.5677 or send an email to kyr@karenrempel.com. I look forward to hearing from you.

Recommendations

“As team lead of the technical writing team for the Enterprise Console product at Bloomberg, Karen has an organized and systematic approach that ensures that work will be done correctly and on time. She demonstrates leadership by acting proactively to determine upcoming requirements, and plans thoughtfully so that these requirements can be met. She has great people skills that work across the organization, and is constantly keeping up to date with product managers and leads to determine developments that might affect the products the writing team supports.”

Lois Patterson, Technical Writer, Google, New York City

“Karen is an excellent technical writer and has a great ability to take a high-level approach and translate it to tangible, detailed steps. Her work ethic and quick ability to understand and document requirements is fantastic. She also has a keen eye for the usability of the target system and a strong understanding of what the business needs.”

Christopher Fay, SVP Product, Wells Fargo, New York City

“Karen is an excellent technical writer, with the process-oriented mind of a business analyst and the creative drive of a product designer. It was incredible how Karen took large and complex documents and converted them into lovely pieces that are easily searchable in a modern UI.

She is also an excellent team leader, maximizing the strengths of her team and guiding her members to improve their skills and optimize the quality of their output.”

Te Bai, Product Manager, Bloomberg L.P., New York City

“Karen was a genuine asset to our process as a start up organization. Her expertise, professionalism and vast wealth of knowledge proved invaluable as we determined and implemented critical procedures for our teams. Her ability to learn quickly and integrate that knowledge into accurate and critical documentation has been a tremendous value add to our business. In addition to her technical skills, Karen brings a professional yet genuinely friendly demeanor to the group, I would work with her again without question.”

Sally Myers, Chief Risk Officer, Private Bank

“Karen has worked on a Delivery Standardization Handbook for Sysco Canada and has provided outstanding technical writing services. Her ability to provide technical direction on the project was superb; she was further able to quickly integrate as a team member on the project and was able to quickly gain trust with the project committee. We are extremely satisfied with her work and contribution and will look to engaging her service for future projects.”

Jon Tuttle, Vice President, BakeMark

For more reviews of my work, please see Recommendations.

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Technical Writer Resume and Interview Tips

Writer's mindI was recently interviewed on the podcast 10-Minute Tech Comm to share insights I’ve gained through screening and interviewing dozens of technical writers during the past six years leading technical writing teams in New York.

Whether you are hiring or want to be hired, here are the top takeaways:

Resume Tips

  1. Submit an impeccable resume. No typos! Make sure all company names, tools, and technologies are capitalized correctly. Is it JavaScript or Javascript?
  2. Use parallel construction. Don’t begin four bullet points with a verb and one with a noun. This type of mistake reveals either carelessness or lack of knowledge of sound technical writing practices.
  3. Keep your verb tense consistent. Use present tense for your current role and past tense for all other roles. Don’t switch tense mid-sentence, please!

If your resume contains mistakes in any of these areas, no matter how great your experience may appear, you’re not the right person for the job.

Interview Tips

  1. Answer questions succinctly and address the question directly.
  2. If you don’t have experience using a particular tool, admit it! Then, if possible, describe experience with a similar tool, or provide an example of learning a new tool quickly.
  3. Research your interviewer and create connection through mentioning something about the interviewer’s interests or experience.

You’re being evaluated not just on your skills but on what it will be like to work with you. Be pleasant, courteous, and show your natural warmth and humor.

Listen to the podcast or read the transcript for more tips and advice.

The X-Factor in User Experience (UX) – New York UX Writer Sprinkles the Fun Flakes in the Fishbowl

This app design is pretty clear, telling the user the valid types of ID and calling for an action (to select). But it would be more clear to say “tap” than “select” since this is a phone app.

When I began looking at my writing experience from a UX perspective for a potential contract at Google, I realized that user experience permeates everything I do. It is the foundation of technical writing.

Technical writers are always asking questions about the user experience:

  • What does the user need to know?
  • What is the best way to provide the information?
  • What level of reading skills do they have?
  • What is their pre-existing experience with the subject matter?
  • How can we best accommodate different skill and experience levels?
  • How do I seamlessly provide the required info, making it findable and making sure it answers all their questions?
What is wrong with this design? What if you want to pay your Macy’s credit card statement. Would you choose “Pay Another Entity,” “Pay a Bill,” or “Pay a Business or Person”? Confusing! Frustrating! The user will likely have to try a few options before they can succeed at their desired task.

The X-factor in user experience design is one more question:

  • How do we make sure the user’s experience is positive and even  delightful?

In my opinion, the technical writer is always the user’s advocate. We have the logical mind to think through every step the user needs to do to perform a task, and on any well-functioning software, app, or web design team, the technical writer is part of the initial design process, collaborating with other experts to find the best way to help the user succeed.

Sprinkling the Fun Flakes

If empathy, logic, and flow are missing, the user is not going to have a good experience, period. If the user can’t figure out what to do, if the app leads to a dead end, if there are no clear indicators of how to find an expected function—the user will feel frustrated and won’t have a positive experience. If the wording is unclear—or worse, badly written or offensive, as in the case of the website of one “UX design expert” I recently viewed—your product is dead in the water.

So cute words, fun graphics, and pleasing haptics are useless unless there is a solid design foundation and clean, clear language.

Technical writers have been helping provide that solid foundation for decades: creating task-focused text that is clear, concise, and useful.

We are the ideal professionals to add the X-factor and sprinkle the fun flakes into the fishbowl:

  • Compelling, effective language, backed by user research.
  • Great copy and tone of voice, conveying the brand and connecting personally to the user.
  • Rewards for accomplishing the tasks. We all like a treat!

Nuff said.

 

New York Technical Writer Talks Video Storytelling

I recently took a course on video storytelling at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. Bob Sacha was an awesome teacher—smart, interesting, and instructive.

Sacha showed entertaining and inspiring examples of videos that have been shot on smartphones, including Hollywood blockbuster films such as Steven Soderbergh’s “High Flying Bird” and “Unsane.” Soderbergh used innovative techniques such as being pushed in a wheelchair instead of using a dolly.

6 Key Principles of Effective Video Storytelling

  • Choose an opening shot that is going to hook your viewer
  • Use a lot of close-ups and extreme close-ups to capture detail and evoke interest
  • Switch camera angles frequently to keep it interesting
  • Bring it on home with the closing shot—a reward for the viewer, with an image to remember that finishes the story
  • Use sound to help establish the mood
  • Evoke emotions in the viewer—we remember how we feel more than what we see or hear

Here’s an example of what I learned. Technical writing “how to” made into art! IMHO! 😉

“Going to California” is a reference to a Led Zeppelin song lyric: “Took my chances on a big jet plane, never let ’em tell you that they’re all the same.” Each pair of students in the class made unique airplanes and unique videos!

Variations on a Theme – Adapting to Your Target Platform

Next I took the principles of great video storytelling and created 3 versions of a video:

Square for Instagram

This one is under 1 minute (timed for an Instagram feed), and square to display well in Instagram.

Short YouTube Version Captures Highlights

This is the length for my Another New York Love Affair art project, where each video is usually under two minutes. It captures the feel of the event, with behind-the-scenes warm-up and a flash on the audience at the beginning.

Full Length

This is the full length of the song. It’s my singing debut, and my Mom might want to see the whole thing!

What Makes Outstanding Technical Documentation

It’s all about the User Experience (UX)…

For this reason, I am a major fan of MadCap Flare. I recommend this extremely robust, customizable Content Management System to all my clients when they need to output a mixture of shared and unique content to multiple audiences. The graphic design capabilities are incredible as well. I’ve replicated gorgeous designs from InDesign in MadCap Flare. And I recommend their Getting Started documentation as the gold standard for what end user documentation should be.

What Makes Outstanding Documentation?

Technical documentation must meet the needs of the audience. The best documentation enhances the user experience and is:

  • accurate
  • easy to find
  • easy to understand
  • describes the tasks the user must perform
  • provides solutions to those frustrating problems that make us turn to the documentation in the first place.
What’s Great About the MadCap Flare Documentation?
  • Text chunking makes the material easy to absorb
  • Navigation is excellent—easy to understand, with an easy-to-follow tree hierarchy, with concepts organized into task-based sections
  • Introductory material is provided in both text and video format, and the videos are very appealing and engaging
  • The language is simple and easy to understand, even when explaining complicated concepts
  • As a marketing tool, this URL makes a very complex, robust Content Management System seem non-intimidating and easy to use. For users of the software, this is a great starting point for learning basics, and even experts may return to this material for foundational concepts.

Top 5 Technical Writing Pain Points

Canadian first aid kit by technical writer Karen Rempel
First Aid for technical writing pain points

As a New York-based technical writer with more than two decades of experience writing for clients in varied industries, in locations from Vancouver to New York to Haiti to Chile, I notice universal themes—pain points that affect all of my clients, whatever their business line or type of documentation.

It’s all about the user experience (UX). If your customers and staff can’t use your product or perform their task, the result is pain and frustration!

Top 5 Technical Writing Pain Points

Here are the top 5 technical documentation pain points:

  1. Obsolete! Existing documentation or procedures are out-of-date
  2. Unclear! Instructions are hard to understand, so staff or customers can’t follow correct procedure
  3. Disorganized! People can’t quickly find the information they need
  4. Incomplete! There are no answers for the particular problem or task
  5. Inconsistent! Procedures or instructions have been updated in one place but not another, leading to conflicting and confusing information

First Aid for Technical Writing Pain Points

Here I’ll tell you how good technical writing documentation addresses these pain points, one by one. Turn your user experience (UX) into satisfaction and delight!

One: From Obsolete to Up-to-the-Minute

Obsolete information is hard to understand by technical writer Karen Rempel
Documentation quickly becomes obsolete without a plan for updating

Time takes a toll on any set of documentation, bringing changes that require updates. Consider this when you create your documentation, and use a system that will be easy to update. Of course, that train may have already left the station, in which case you need:

  • A Content Management System to keep track of all your source documents
  • A regular update process and schedule
  • A system for keeping track of changes, whether it’s specialized software or simply an Excel spreadsheet or an internal Wiki.

Two: From Unclear to Crystal

User test your documentation by Karen Rempel technical writer
User testing is key to ensure your technical documentation is clear

Unreadability leading to lack of understanding is one of the biggest problems with documentation, and it usually occurs because the person who wrote the documentation knows the subject matter well but is not a skilled writer. Ways to ensure your documentation is crystal clear:

  • Use a simple writing style aimed at an eighth-grade reader
  • Explain all jargon and technical terms
  • Get actual users to follow the instructions and test the procedures – sounds like a no-brainer, right? But few companies actually do this!

Three: From Disorganized to Swiss Precision

Organized like a Swiss candy shop by Karen Rempel
Tagged and structured content is as organized as a Swiss candy shop

Disorganized, hard-to-find information is a very common problem, especially with complicated software or procedures that require lengthy documentation. If you have a thick binder of operating procedures or a stack of user guides, chances are, no one will look at them. But even a slender tome won’t help if the user can’t find the information they need.

To make your content findable:

  • Organize topics with clear titles and headings
  • Deliver content in a searchable online format so that people can quickly look up the subject
  • Include alternate search terms in your text or tags, so that people kind find a subject even if they don’t know the exact term that they’re looking for
  • Organize content by user task, not by the software menu structure.

Four: From Incomplete to Spot-On

Gaps in technical documentation by Karen Rempel technical writer
Do you have gaps in your documentation?

Identifying gaps in the documentation is tricky, because you don’t know what you don’t know. Here are some sleuthing techniques to discover what’s missing and fill the holes:

  • Test the software or process rigorously, to find out what areas haven’t been documented
  • Make a list of all the tasks or procedures your users need to perform and correlate this to the existing content to identify gaps
  • Try doing the task wrong to find out what trouble-shooting tips your users will need
  • Again, user-test the documentation and watch where they go wrong, as well as what kinds of information they try to look up, then make sure you give them what they need!

Five: From Inconsistent to Single Source

Consistency solves technical writing pain point by Karen Rempel technical writer
Consistency is king!

Inconsistency is a problem that often creeps in over time as different people update the documentation set, perhaps making changes in one place but not another, or using different terminology to describe the same thing. Even different writing styles can be confusing to the end reader.

With technical writing, consistency is king! To achieve it:

  • Develop style and terminology guidelines, and follow them
  • Keep on track by having an editor or dedicated staff member oversee all updates when you have a team making changes
  • Use a Content Management System such as MadCap Flare to single source your text, so that a change only needs to be made in one place and it will be automatically updated throughout your documentation set.

A Cure for the Pain

Pay for the expertise you need by Karen Rempel technical writer
An expert technical writer helps you succeed!

What is your top pain point? Do you need a remedy?

Karen Rempel, technical writing expert, to the rescue!

  • A good documentation specialist can solve your unique problems and create a set of documentation that meets your user needs and is easy to maintain.
  • The technical writer is the advocate for your user, and brings a perspective that will help you design documentation that is findable, clear, and easy to follow.
  • You get what you pay for. If you have a complex project, a product that is complicated to use, or procedures that are difficult to perform correctly, you need an experienced, expert technical writer. Budget for a professional, and you will save money in the long run.

Operating Procedures Helped New Bank to Open in NYC

CIO Linda Orlando, me, and CEO Judith Erwin on Orange Day at Grasshopper Bank
Former CIO Linda Orlando, technical writing consultant Karen Rempel, and CEO Judith Erwin celebrating Orange Day at Grasshopper Bank, May 2018 (working towards getting the bank ready for the official opening, which occurred in May 2019)

It was a day of celebration yesterday, as Grasshopper Bank completed its journey from conception to implementation. Grasshopper Bank is the first new bank to open in New York City since the housing crisis of 2008. The “C-Suite” team is led by CEO Judith Erwin, and some of the top women in the banking industry are the lights guiding this financial institution. The dynamic team, composed of industry heavyweights who have over 200 years of combined experience in commercial banking and financial services, raised close to $100 million in order to obtain OCC* approval. The bank will focus on New York’s “innovation economy,” with corporate, venture capital, and start-up clients.

I played a crucial role in helping the new bank obtain approval from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and make it to the starting line. I developed over 50 required standard operating procedures, working with various roles across the bank to determine procedures that would guide staff to perform all daily operations tasks in compliance with federal banking regulations. I brought my expertise in T24 to the task, and helped develop and document software requirements as well as procedures. My role included business analysis and training as well as technical writing, and I helped the team learn end-to-end processes for all daily and monthly procedures, from taking a deposit and boarding a loan to generating a financial statement.

I worked closely with the Chief Risk Officer, Sally Myers, to develop the required procedures to provide oversight from a risk mitigation and compliance perspective. I worked with CFO Sangeeta Kishore to ensure that the Operations team provided all required data and reports to her desk in a timely manner.

It was an exhilarating challenge and a great deal of fun, working with a fantastic team of people in an extremely dynamic, fast-paced environment. My daily compadres were the Operations team, under COO Gary Blumenthal,  and it was a real pleasure to work with this group to ensure they would be able to perform all required tasks on day one.

We focused on the user experience (UX) to ensure that staff and customers will love using the bank’s internal and external banking tools, developed for mobile and the web. The team of T24 consultants under Nikki Nelson were amazing to work with, and they were instrumental in bringing the bank to the point of opening the doors yesterday.

I wish the wonderful folks at Grasshopper Bank every success as they open their doors for business. Mazel tov!

*The OCC is an independent bureau within the United States Department of the Treasury that was established by the National Currency Act of 1863 and serves to charter, regulate, and supervise all national banks and thrift institutions and the federally licensed branches and agencies of foreign banks in the United States.

New York, NY Technical Writer Looks at High Rises in the West Village

Karen Rempel New York NYC Technical Writer article for WestView NewsI recently toured one of the newest high rises that’s taking shape along the Hudson River in the West Village of New York City. 160 Leroy Street has a unique curvy design by Swiss architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron, making this star the most glamorous on the block. I wrote an article about the West Village’s new neighbor for the WestView News.

As neighbors go, 160 Leroy is more like Sophia Loren than Ralph Kramden, with the two private-elevatored penthouses selling this year for $51 million (7,750 square feet, with a rooftop pool) and $31.5 million (4,849 square feet, with a rooftop oasis), and a modest 9th floor one-bedroom (1,096 square feet, with double exposures) listed at $3.2 million. I concluded that this neighbor is going to be viewed 100 years from now as one of the most exciting architectural examples of our era.

New York, NY Technical Writer and Web Content Developer Designs Etsy Store

Krystyna's Place Etsy StoreI worked a part-time job at Krystyna’s Place on Cornelia St. in New York this summer. I wanted to connect with people on the streets of New York, as a way of solidifying my transition from Vancouver to New York. I opened and closed the store, served customers, dressed the windows, and created an online store for Krystyna’s Place on Etsy. This web content development project entailed creating all the visual and design elements for the store, including a logo and header. I photographed 30 pieces that Krystyna had selected, measured them, wrote descriptions, and fell in love with the clothes!

This was the ideal summer job, allowing me to bring together my technical writing, photography, and design skills into a practical, hands-on situation with New York people and fashion. Now I can add fashion to the list of industries I’ve written for. For a fuller account, see my Wild Visions site.